A coalition of local educators and LGBTQ+ organizations in California are unveiling 10 new LGBTQ+ history lessons for the state’s K-12 public school classrooms under the theme “Pride, Resistance, Joy: Teaching Intersectional LGBTQ+ Stories of California and Beyond.” 

The curriculum was created by local K-12 teachers in collaboration with the LGBTQ+ history organization One Institute, the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, the UCLA History-Geography Project, and the queer student support program Out for Safe Schools at the Los Angeles LGBT Center. The ongoing collaborative partnership has been developing LGBTQ+ history curriculum for state schools since 2018.

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While the lessons will be unveiled on Thursday, they’ll align with the state’s 2011 Fair, Accurate, Inclusive, and Respectful (FAIR) Education Act, a law that requires public schools to include the historical contributions of LGBTQ+ Americans in history lessons and classroom textbooks.

Lesson plan materials provided by the aforementioned organizations show that one kindergarten lesson will explore, “What are some ways we can show how to be a strong community member?” An 8th-grade U.S. History lesson plan will ask, “To what extent did historical figures agree or disagree with ‘all men are created equal’ during their activism?” 

A 9th-grade Ethnic Studies lesson plan will ask, “What role did community organizations play in supporting queer AAPI [Asian-American and Pacific Islander] people in the 1980s and 1990s?” A 12th-grade U.S. Government lesson plan will ask, “How did LGBTQ+ immigrants push for more inclusive immigration policies in the 1970s and 1980s?”

The currently available lesson plans for high schoolers include ones about queer activist and poet Audre Lorde, AIDS & HIV activism, gay racial civil rights organizer Bayard Rustin, queerness in 1920s and 1930s Hollywood, trailblazing San Francisco politcian Harvey Milk, the removal of homosexuality as a classified mental disorder, transgender-inclusive German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, how urbanization affected alternative family structures, and other topics.

In a statement, Trevor Ladner, Director of Education Programs at One Institute said, “The FAIR Education Act affirms students’ right to study the pride, resistance, and joy of LGBTQ+ history and culture. These lesson plans equip K-12 teachers with standards-aligned resources and effective practices to teach intersectional LGBTQ+ histories,” 

Peta Lindsay, Associate Director of the UCLA History-Geography Project said, “LGBTQ+ students, teachers, and families are essential members of our communities, and LGBTQ+ history is an essential part of our shared history. Every student deserves access to empowering LGBTQ+ history in schools.”

The development of LGBTQ+ inclusive-curriculum under California’s FAIR Act

The landmark legislation, the first of its kind in the nation, was introduced by then-State Sen. Mark Leno (D), and signed into law by then-Gov. Jerry Brown(D).

Historian Don Romesburg, the lead scholar who worked with advocacy organizations to pass the act, served as director of a committee to develop the act’s original curriculum framework.

Romesburg and his committee of 20 scholars — all who specialize in different areas of LGBTQ+, U.S. and world history — went line-by-line through the state’s curriculum and suggested ways to incorporate LGBTQ+ material based on current research and age-appropriateness. Their framework didn’t just include famous LGBT historical figures but also encouraged students to think critically about family structures, gender roles, and institutional oppressions throughout time.

The current framework has students in the 2nd grade social studies classes learning how LGBTQ+ families exist alongside families with adoptive parents, step-parents, and parents who are immigrants. In 4th-grade California history, students learn about famous 19th-century stagecoach driver Charley Parkhurst, a western pioneer who lived and dressed as a man but was discovered after death to have been assigned a female gender at birth

“This is great time for critical thinking,” Romesburg said, “to get people to think about birth-assigned gender and why someone would dress like [a man] in the Gold Rush era of the West.”

In 5th grade Early American history classes, some lessons emphasize how two-spirit shamans and multi-parent families in indigenous American tribes changed as a result of colonization. In 8th grade, students of 19th-century U.S. history discuss how Black people and women forged their own families in response to slavery and industrialization.

Social science electives for 9th graders include mentions of famous lesbian and bisexual women in, and ethnic studies classes mention famous queer people of color. Modern world history classes for 10th graders cover the persecution of gay people during the Holocaust.

The 11th grade modern U.S. history classes look at the evolution of modern LGBTQ+ communities throughout history (like during the Harlem Renaissance, WWII, and the sexual liberation movement of the 1970s). They also cover the persecution of sexual and gender minorities by the medical community, the U.S. military, the U.S. government, the religious right, and throughout the AIDS epidemic and current LGBTQ+ court cases.

Over the years, the state train educators about how to incorporate LGBTQ+ material into their classes and to advocate for textbook and educational material providers to create LGBTQ+-inclusive materials. California is a huge text book market and has a huge influence on the rest of the country’s textbook materials, so textbook producers have a strong financial incentive to create textbooks in line with California’s new standards, standards that will likely affect the textbooks of smaller states around the U.S..

As for claims of “sexual brainwashing”, Romesburg said, “It’s a contemporary reality that there’s an modern LGBT rights movement and that LGBT people exist. You don’t have to take a political view on whether you approve of that to know that it has a history and that history is something that all students should have access to.”

He added, “One of the things that’s most exciting is there are many educators in California that have been eager to include LGBT content in their teaching, but they haven’t know how. And this gives them a roadmap in a substantial way to do this in elementary, middle and high school. It’s utterly transformative and truly history-making.”